FAQ

We know not everyone needs, or believes they need, a solution as powerful as CETOL 6σ, so this new solution should be of great interest to Mechanical Designers and Engineers who are involved in CAD-modeling activities. It automates many of the common but time-consuming and often error-prone tasks required for 1D stack up analyses. It provides a more complete picture than traditionally obtained from a spreadsheet calculation and can alert the user in many situations when the tolerance stack up may not be 1D in nature.

Will it work with my CAD system?

YES! EZtol works with files from most major CAD systems, and it does not utilize the CAD license to work on the model.

Supported File Types

Translator

Supported Versions

Alias

V10 or later

CATIA V4

All Revisions

CATIA V5

R6 – V5-6R2015

Creo Parametric

1.0; 2.0; 3.0

DWF/DWFx

6.0 – 7.5

DWG

All Revisions

IDF

2.0; 3.0

IGES

All Revisions

JT

7.0 – 10.0

NX

Unigraphics V13 – NX 10

OBJ

N/A

Parasolid

Up to 28.0

Pro/ENGINEER

Up to Wildfire 5.0

Pro/ENGINEER Granite

Up to 9.0

Pro/ENGINEER Neutral

N/A

Rhino

Up to 5.0

RVT

Up to R2017

SAT

Up to 7.0

SolidWorks

2001 Plus – 2016

STEP

AP214, AP203E2, AP242

STL

N/A

SMT

Up to ASM222

What is the difference between TAE in Creo and EZtol?

TAE is a 1D tolerance analysis tool integrated within Creo that lets the user define tolerance studies while continuing to work in their Creo session. It’s primary advantage over the new EZtol program is that it works directly with dimensions and associated tolerances in the Creo model files. This means as the tolerances are adjusted based on the analysis results they are automatically transferred back to the Creo model data.

EZtol is a standalone application that can open files from many different CAD packages. As such it doesn’t require the source CAD software to be running. It offers a different workflow for the definition of tolerance stack ups similar to CETOL – namely feature-based definition instead of selecting dimensions in the loop.

A few of the capabilities EZtol offers over TAE include:

handling more types of geometric tolerances

allowing the user to select RSS in addition to worst-case and statistical analysis methods

alerting the user to many situations where a 1D treatment may not be sufficient to fully understand the actual variation that can occur

automatically capturing snapshots of the loop definition on the assembly model to include in the report

While it doesn’t obtain dimension and tolerance information from the source files, nor can it update them, it does maintain the concept of part-level dimensioning schemes so that dimensions appearing in multiple stack up definitions are easily identifiable.